LIVE AT FIVESIX: 11.12.12

If you’re like me, your TV viewing is limited almost entirely to news, more news, documentaries and old movies, which means you don’t watch network primetime shows, and therefore have never heard of Ariel Winter. She is a 14-year-old actress who stars in the ABC comedy Modern Family, which is one of the network’s most popular shows, with an audience of more than 12 million viewers.

Like most of you — we’re all political news junkies here, right? — I was only vaguely aware that this TV show existed and had never heard of Ariel Winter at all until last week when the tabloid sites like TMZ started going nuts about an ugly custody battle involving Winter, her mother and Winter’s older sister.

A California court ordered Ariel removed from her family home because of accusations that her mother physically abused her:

[O]n October 3rd, after a guardianship hearing, a judge determined the allegations that Ariel was being physically and emotionally abused by her mother Chrystal Workman were serious enough that the judge placed Ariel in a temporary guardianship with her older sister Shanelle Workman. . . .
Ironically, we’ve learned Shanelle suffered the same alleged abuse as Ariel. Nearly two decades ago, the Department of Children and Family Services removed her from Chrystal’s home based on similar abuse allegations. Law enforcement sources tell us … D.C.F.S. placed Shanelle in foster care for more than 2 years. She never went back to her mother.

OK, this is serious stuff. But there is another side of the story: Ariel has reportedly been dating an 18-year-old actor named Cameron Palatas and, according to Ariel’s mother, the two young lovebirds were, um, inappropriately intimate:

The mother of Modern Family star Ariel Winter filed an incident report with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department after she allegedly caught her 14-year-old daughter engaged in a sexual act with an 18-year-old man.
The police filing — obtained exclusively by Celebuzz — details “suspicious circumstances, possible unlawful sex with minor,” according to the officer who spoke to Chris Workman, Winter’s mother, on October 6. . . .
“On 09-24-12, at approximately 2200-hours, she walked in the guest bedroom of her home and found her daughter, Ariel Winter Workman, in bed with boyfriend, [Name Redacted],” the three-page report claims.
Workman told the Sheriff explicit details about what she saw when she walked into the room at her Montrose, Calif. home. . . .
“According to the informant, Ariel and [Name Redacted] have been boyfriend/girlfriend for approximately 5 months. She has attempted to break them up because of their age difference.” . . .
In an earlier statement on Thursday, Workman claimed her teenage daughter’s relationship with the man, four years her senior, was the real reason behind the young actress’ decision to ask a judge to temporarily place her in her sister’s care. . . .
Workman told Celebuzz she “caught them engaging in behavior that I feel my daughter is too young mentally and physically to understand.”
“I put a stop to it immediately,” Workman said.
“I filed charges against him because legally he is an adult and if he wants to engage in adult behavior with a minor than he should also be ready to suffer adult consequences for his actions and poor judgment.”

The gossip site makes a big deal of not naming Ariel’s boyfriend, but it’s not exactly a secret, per this Newark Star-Ledger headline:

More ‘Family’ drama: Ariel Winter’s
boyfriend Cameron Palatas targeted by mom

So we have Ariel accusing her mom of abuse and Ariel’s mom accusing Palatas of robbing the cradle, and all of this lurid stuff involving the young star of one of TV’s most popular sitcoms is being played out daily in the gossip headlines.

TMZ seems intent on making Ariel’s mom the villain in the story, implying that she just made up the sex allegation after she lost custody, but as a parent — and having once also been a teenage boy — I’m decidedly more sympathetic to the mother’s side of the dispute.

All in all, this story does not bode well for Ariel Winter’s future and, having watched similar dramas play out in the cases of former teen stars like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, I’d say we’re just a few years away from seeing headlines along the lines of “Ariel Winter gets another DUI” and “Ariel Winter goes back to rehab.”

On TV, Modern Family is a comedy. In real life, not so much.

Category: Celebrities, Scandal

The Other Woman’s Jealousy of the Central Command Liaison Brought About the Downfall of CIA Director Petraeus

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 26 Comments

The resemblance between the Obama administration’s national security policy and a soap opera is purely coincidental:

The FBI was investigating harassing emails sent by Petraeus biographer and girlfriend Paula Broadwell to a second woman. That probe of Broadwell’s emails revealed the affair between Broadwell and Petraeus. The FBI contacted Petraeus and other intelligence officials, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper asked Petraeus to resign.
A senior U.S. military official identified the second woman as Jill Kelley, 37, who lives in Tampa, Fla., and serves as an unpaid social liaison to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, where the military’s Central Command and Special Operations Command are located.
Staffers for Petraeus said Kelley and her husband were regular guests at events he held at Central Command headquarters. . . .
The military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the investigation, said Kelley had received harassing emails from Broadwell, which led the FBI to examine her email account and eventually discover her relationship with Petraeus.
A former associate of Petraeus confirmed the target of the emails was Kelley, but said there was no affair between the two, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the retired general’s private life. The associate, who has been in touch with Petraeus since his resignation, says Kelley and her husband were longtime friends of Petraeus and wife, Holly.

Keep in mind that Paula Broadwell is a West Point graduate who met Petraeus when she was getting a graduate degree at Harvard and yet — and yet — she was so stupidly jealous that she accidentally destroyed Petraeus’s career because of her irrational (and apparently mistaken) suspicion that the CIA director was also shagging the “social liaison” at CentCom HQ in Tampa.

Remind me of this episode the next time some Ivy League egghead starts asserting the inherent superiority of the meritocratic elite.

Category: Military, Scandal, Sex

The Execrable Bill Maher

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 21 Comments

Noel Sheppard asks, “Exactly how does HBO put up with this week after week after week?”

“The other good news is the Republicans are taking the loss well. Who am I kidding? Are you serious? No. It’s like half the nation just found out that their wife is f–king a black guy. That’s what really happened.”

Update (Smitty): if I may be so rude as to step on a Stacy post,

@dkmkc2000 Snark is like spice in the food; less is more. Whereas I think ‘Maher’ means ‘jug of bile’ in Swabian. #MadeThatUp

— Chris Smith (@smitty_one_each) November 10, 2012

Category: Celebrities, Election 2012

WaPo Publishes ‘Long, Sympathetic Article’ About Convicted Serial Rapist

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 4 Comments

Professor Ann Althouse questions the timing of what she calls “an elaborately worked-out invitation into the mind of the rapist that expects us to care about his struggle to understand himself.”

As an aficionado of “true crime” stories, I find the Washington Post article by Josh White fascinating in the same way I was fascinated by Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter (about the Manson family) or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Both of those famous stories illustrate a phenomenon that gets too little attention in our understanding of crime, namely how often the grisly atrocities that make national headlines are committed by petty criminals who, having gotten away with minor offenses (or following their release from prison) step up their anti-social behavior to ever-more serious crime.

This is what we might call escalating recidivism, and the story of the “East Coast Rapist,” Aaron Thomas, shows that Thomas had many common characteristics of such criminals, including a fractured family background and an early tendency toward impulsive misconduct:

Aaron Hajj-Malik Thomas was born in August 1971; his father was a D.C. police officer and his mother a career Geico employee. His middle name honored Malcolm X. He grew up with a half brother and a half sister, but he was the only biological son of Donald B. Thomas, whom most everyone called “Big Don.”
Big Don and his son had a particularly rough relationship, according to relatives. Thomas recalls beatings with a thick police-uniform belt and his father slamming him into walls. Family members described screaming matches and constant turmoil.
“When we were both small, my father was a strict disciplinarian. Very strict,” said Michael Battle, Thomas’s older brother. “You didn’t do anything out of sorts or it was hell to pay. When we started to fight back in our way, problems started. With Aaron, it seemed to go way down a rabbit hole. It went further.”
Living in a home with two working parents, an emphasis on education, meticulous order and no one wanting for anything, Thomas was at once the family comedian and alarmingly unpredictable. . . .
“From day one, he’s had a control problem,” Battle said. “Odd behavior. Couldn’t control his temper. It was thing after thing after thing after thing.” . . .

The entire article is nearly 7,000 words long and worth reading if, like me, you have an interest in the psychology of criminality.

Thomas’s lack of impulse control manifested itself at an early age and we read that “he stole a bicycle as a teenager,” got into fights and, at age 20, “he was arrested three times for cocaine possession and was placed on probation.” Thomas was a sort of trouble magnet, and was shot in 1992 the day before he was scheduled to testify against the suspect in a robbery. His career as a serial rapist reportedly began around the same time, when he raped a prostitute in D.C. Thomas’s ex-girlfriends describe him as controlling, jealous and sometimes violent. His criminal career eventually culminated in the 2010 rape of three teenage girls who were trick-or-treating in suburban Woodbridge, Virginia.

Now, Aaron Thomas is likely to be sentenced to multiple life sentences, his evil acts having scarred the lives of more than a dozen victims. There’s probably some lesson to be learned here. To me, it relates to the “broken windows” theory of crime prevention: The petty criminal — the burglar, the thief, the minor dope dealer — is potentially capable of serious crime. The defiant anti-social personality who finds himself able to get away with petty crime will tend to develop an arrogant contempt for the law, which leads to the pattern of escalating recividism. Thus, more stringent enforcement of laws against relatively minor offenses will ultimately tend to reduce the number of serious offenses.

Category: Crime

Podhoretz ‘Evolves’ on Gay Marriage; Editorial Insubordination, Not So Much

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 22 Comments

Donald Douglas calls to our attention an interesting internecine quarrel at Commentary, where their freelance literary critic David Myers has been terminated because of a dispute that Myers claims was about gay marriage, but which the magazine’s editor John Podhoretz says was in fact about acts of insubordination by Myers:

What I did not like, and what I could not accept, was that David had decided unilaterally to convert [his blog] Literary Commentary into a sociopolitical blog without a moment’s consultation. This I considered an uncollegial and insubordinate act,and I’m afraid it was not the first of these. I would not have allowed him to do so had he asked; I might have considered publishing the item on this blog, though to tell you the truth, I found his take goopy and overheated.
But the issue was not the content. He did not have the authority to redefine his blog in this fashion. This is something he clearly accepted and understood in the past, because there have been times when he has reverted to his old blog, A Commonplace Blog, as he did tonight, to publish things he clearly understood were beyond the scope of Literary Commentary.

Hear! Hear! The authority of the editor-in-chief is beyond question. This is one of the fundamental principles of journalism: Someone must be in charge of the organization. The Boss may rule with an iron hand or he may give his staff wide discretion, but either way, the ultimate authority of The Boss cannot be defied by his subordinates. Otherwise the editor’s title is meaningless and anarchy will ensue.

It is worth noting that David Myers has been writing for Commentary for more than two decades and that we should properly call him Professor Myers, as he has a Ph.D. and is on the faculty of Ohio State University. This is perhaps a generational quarrel: Professor Myers began writing for Commentary when Norman Podhoretz was the editor, and may not have extended to the son the same respect he had for the father.

On the other hand, this may be a culture clash between the journalistic world and the academic world within which Professor Myers earns his daily bread. Inhabitants of the faculty lounges make much of what William F. Buckley Jr. famously called “the superstition of academic freedom,” and Professor Myers evidently thought he could smuggle that superstition into Commentary without bothering to notify the editor. He admits as much:

What’s more, as an academic for more than twenty years, I have become too comfortable with intellectual autonomy; I clearly and admittedly did not show the proper deference to Mr Podhoretz’s authority.

Let us also note that Commentary is a monthly magazine which, in the Internet age, has also become an up-to-the-minute source for online news, analysis and opinion. This is similarly true for The American Spectator, where I write, as for nearly every other established publication: To remain relevant, one must be online, and to be relevant online, one must continually generate fresh content. Thus the publication that is monthly (or weekly or fortnightly) in print has no choice but to be as contemporaneous as the Associated Press when it comes to reporting, aggregating and commenting on breaking news developments.

Just yesterday, for example, I cited a Commentary report by Bethany Mandel describing the Romney campaign’s ORCA debacle. This is the kind of current-events reporting that a monthly magazine would scarcely have touched in the print-only era; by the time Commentary could have published a magazine article about the ORCA project, the story already would have been picked apart by the daily newspapers and weekly news magazines. Yet the equalizing effect of the Internet permits — really, requires — John Podhoretz’s staff to compete with every other news organization in the world and, in the case of Mandel’s ORCA article, we may say that Commentary has beaten the digital vestiges of Newsweek and Time.

All this is a long way around to explaining why Podhoretz is correct to insist on his prerogative to enforce adherence to editorial procedure. His role is less and less like the editor of a monthly highbrow journal, and more and more like the city-desk boss at a daily newspaper. And anyone who ever worked in the newspaper business knows better than to contest the authority of the city editor.

As to the topic of gay marriage, there is actually no fundamental quarrel between Myers and Podhoretz, as the latter makes clear:

As it happens, like our president, I was for a long time an opponent of gay marriage. I am not any longer—indeed, I am relieved that on Tuesday night citizens of four states chose freely to allow gay marriage within their borders rather than having such a thing imposed through judicial fiat. However, I am deeply respectful of those traditionalists who stand in opposition to it for profound reasons of conscience and faith and do not deserve to have the word “bigot” hurled unjustly at them. David Myers is himself an Orthodox Jew, and official Orthodox Jewry certainly does not share his views of gay marriage; I doubt he considers the Orthodox rabbinate institutionally evil.

This declaration of unprincipled pragmatism is scarcely encouraging, and one imagines that enforcing conformity to this New Pragmatism will require further purges — Goldilocks-like, the Podhoretzian embrace of gay marriage must be neither too hot nor too cold — but his authority as editorial enforcer is unlimited. The publishers of Commentary must either support Podhoretz 100% in the exercise of that authority, or else find themselves a new editor.

UPDATE: David Myers e-mails a correction, saying that he “started writing for the magazine when Neal Kozodoy was the editor.”

Category: Gays, Journalism, Marriage

Alfonzo Rachel’s Important Rant

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

I like Herman Cain, and this is a great argument.

Given that Gloria Allred delivered the final, crushing blow to the Cain campaign, one is tempted to speculate whether somebody on the Left wasn’t agreeing with Alfonzo Rachel’s thesis.

Via Mike Cornelison

Category: PJTV, Video

O’Neill: “All Politics Is Local”

Posted on | November 11, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

That is due to a lack of useful division between local, state, and national politics. Thus, Washington DC finds the national dialogue distracted by concerns about a particular a pair of crotches in Bozeman, Montana. Were they both male and seek some legal status that they can label ‘marriage’? Was that a heterosexual brace of crotches, the female of which conceived a third crotch, and now wishes to dispose of it? If the third crotch is, itself, female, does disposal count as a war on women? Why or why not? Sorry if I sound crotchety. Perhaps I should crochet in silence.

Where I’m driving on the crotch rocket is the point that the macro-level concerns of a federal government are consumed with micro-level, hormonal interests. Social Conservatives aren’t helping themselves by elevating these concerns to a federal level, and, credit where due, the loyal opposition is doing a bang-up job of capitalizing on the error. We give them ammunition, and they send it right back.

A stronger differentiation between the sacred and profane, the federal and the state, would be a better direction. The challenge is convincing people to get their minds off of crotches.

Category: Culture

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The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVESIX: 11.12.12

Bizarre Drama Surrounds Teenage ‘Modern Family’ Starlet Ariel Winter

The Other Woman’s Jealousy of the Central Command Liaison Brought About the Downfall of CIA Director Petraeus

The Execrable Bill Maher

WaPo Publishes ‘Long, Sympathetic Article’ About Convicted Serial Rapist

Podhoretz ‘Evolves’ on Gay Marriage; Editorial Insubordination, Not So Much

Alfonzo Rachel’s Important Rant

O’Neill: “All Politics Is Local”

THE FULL METAL JACKET REACH-AROUND AWARD

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